"Father Vaillant made no reply. He stood looking intently at the pages of his letter. The Bishop saw a drop of water splash down upon the violet script and spread. He turned quickly and went out through the arched doorway" (256)
Father Vaillant, in one of the few dramatic shows of emotion by either him or his dear friend Father Latour, lets a tear fall when the latter implicitly speaks of their inseparability -- on the eve of his departure for Colorado -- by advising to keep their mules Contento and Angelica together. By describing the tear as "a drop of water" and having Father Latour abruptly leave when he sees this tear, Cather gives the priests' emotions an austere quality.
"The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless — or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks" (4)
In the first scene in which we meet Father Latour, he is struggling through the desert of New Mexico, which is as of yet unknown to him. Not only has he strayed from his path and become lost, the environment itself also does not present anything comprehensible or familiar to him: he can neither find his way nor feel a sense of comfort from it, as he would from his native French landscape.
"Moreover, these Indians disliked novelty and change. They came and went by the old paths worn into the rock by the feet of their fathers, used the old natural stairway of stone to climb to their mesa towns, carried water from the old springs, even after white men had dug wells" (236)
The two specific details of the Indians using old paths and drawing water from springs vividly illustrate the notion that they are resistant to changes in their way of life. Both the description of the feet of successive ages wearing the path into the rock (as opposed to marking it by deliberate construction, as would be typical of Western civilization) and the natural flowing of the river (as opposed to the drilling of a well) represent a way of life in harmony with nature.
